Gritty Realism in a Post-Short Rest Age

[Catullus64]

The Gritty Realism variant rule has had ample ink spilled over it, as has Wizards' overall trend of moving away from Short Rests as a design paradigm, but I think I've yet to see much discussion of the two in conjunction.

Some background for the unaware: Gritty Realism is a (poorly named) variant rule presented in the Dungeon Master's Guide. Under this rule, a Short Rest takes 8 hours to complete, while a Long Rest requires a week of sustained downtime. Many, myself included, like this rule for a myriad of reasons: it changes the rhythm of the adventuring day and makes resource management more challenging, it promotes a longer timeframe for campaign narratives, it encourages and creates space for downtime activities, and it makes PCs feel just a little bit more human and vulnerable.

When I refer to WotC moving away from Short Rests, I refer to a trend of making limited-use features more uniformly tied to Proficiency Bonus and Long Rests, whether those features come from races or classes, rather than ability modifiers or short rests. This is a fairly well-observed trend, and I think it's safe to assume it will be the norm in the much-anticipated rework that the game is set to receive in 2024.

I don't think that Gritty Realism as it exists now will be at all well supported by the new paradigm. Mid-adventure rests will become essentially excised from the game, and that for me removes a lot of the interesting drama that comes from the need to camp and rest in safety, and it slows the pace of the game down too much. To preserve the feel of GR, DMs might need to do extensive, granular homebrew on which features are tied to which kind of rest, and that's a less than ideal place to be.

That said, I think the change, if thoroughly implemented, does push the default game a little closer to the pacing of GR. If the more short-rest dependent classes (Monks, Warlocks, and Fighters especially) are adjusted to fit the paradigm, I can see the base game itself emulating GR in small ways. One thing that could be very good would be gradual recovery of features, Hit Points, & spell slots over multiple rests, instead of the all-or-nothing system of today. There is some precedent for features taking more than one Long Rest to recover, but it's generally reserved only for big, flashy capstone features like Divine Intervention and Limited Wish.

What do you hope or expect to see the future of GR become, if and when short rests become a thing of the past?

[Trask]

I think the gritty realism rules as presented aren't very well thought out as they pertain to class features. A DM wishing to use the rules will probably already want some house rules to address the duration of spells like mage armor. I would agree that if short rests were phased out it would only make GR that much harder to use, but maybe that would be reason for them to develop something new, maybe in a DMG 2.0

I would like to see WotC develop some robust "knobs", if you will, for calibrating a campaign to specific tastes, something that could build on GR would be nice but I wouldn't be surprised if they scrapped the whole thing. Personally I'm not a fan of GR, balance issues aside, I think a week is way too long for what is a pretty basic part of the adventuring cycle for all but the least combat focused campaigns. Although I do think it works for campaigns where adventuring happens in "seasons", like in a Pendragon sort of way where you might go on a couple adventures a year but the rest of the time you're obligated to fulfill some duty, work a job, or manage your estate, but those adventures either have to be pretty darn short not overtax the PCs or the PCs need to have a lot of consumable magic items, or there needs to be multiple PCs per player that can "tag in" or "tag out" if a PC gets too wounded to continue.

[Sorinth]

I doubt they will do away with all short rest resources even though yes they are becoming less common then before. SR features were tilted towards martial/physical features and so I suspect the on-going shift we see is them trying to help with that martial/caster divide that is more prominent in games where there aren't a lot of SR (Which I'd guess is more frequent then they initially expected).

I'm not sure it changes all that much in terms of GR but it obviously depends on the adventure pacing. For example, a GR adventure where there's several days of travel to a location with some encounters along the way and then a bunch of encounters at the location it will probably not be impacted much. The distribution of when you spend your resources will be impacted a little but that's about it.